Even though I want to be a professional organiser, I have to admit my house is not all colour coded and simplified, YET. But I am getting there. Yesterday I organised my spice drawer. I realised during the process that I own a lot of spices. It looks like I must be an amazing chef, but I'm pretty average as a cook. I'd like to think my food tastes nice enough but I do seem to have a gourmet amount of spices to cook with. I'm not sure what the average number is and perhaps compared to some, I don't have very many, but it was a bit of a revelation to me that I had so many different types of seasonings.
My spice drawer irritated me on a daily basis. I could never find what I wanted in there and always had to route around for about five minutes to dig out the flavour I needed. My kids have a habit of putting extra seasoning on EVERYTHING I make, even without tasting the food first. They would always go in that drawer and rummage around and mess it up even more. Then when they were done with the spice, they would pretty much just throw it back in the drawer. When I was at IKEA the other week, I saw these spice jars and thought, why not? So I bought some. I didn't realise at the time how many different ones I owned, so annoyingly I didn't buy quite enough. Since IKEA is an hour away, I went on their website to order more and they took three weeks to arrive! They just arrived yesterday so I had a little celebratory organising session and busted out my trusty label maker.
Are the spice jars amazing? No. You really do get what you pay for. The lids are shiny plastic rather than metal and rather fake looking, but they do sit nicely in the drawer and make it very easy to see everything. They were an inexpensive way to organise a big hot mess and they hold a generous amount so even the spices I had two jars of, were able to be combined into one container. Now, I love opening this drawer and can easily find what I'm looking for. The girls can practice their alphabetization when they put things away and it's very easy to see where you got the item from, so you can put it back in the right place.
Sometimes it's the simple things that bring the most joy. It really does give me a small burst of happiness when I open that drawer now. I like being able to easily measure the spices straight from the jars and they are a lot nicer than all the mis-matched crazy I had in there before.
So if you're feeling a little stuck or need a small pick-me-up, I challenge you to a spicy organising session.
My quote for today is by Seneca the Younger, "There has never been any great genius without a spice of madness." I had to look up Seneca the Younger because I wanted to know if there was an Older as well. He was born in 4BC and was a philosopher. His dad was known as Seneca the Elder and was born in 54 BC. Just your random facts for today.
My photos for today are my before and afters of my spice drawer.
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